Also, addressing a question about no auth string sent in the first request, that is the default behaviour of Wget for identification of the auth protocol. This can be overridden by using the switch --auth-no-challenge so it won't wait for a challenge from the server and will instead send the credentials in the first request itself.

i built a simple webserver with pythons BaseHTTPServer, which
requires a basic http auth. the server answers in http 1.0 and
sends no Connection: keep-alive header.

Now i tried to test it with wget, which sent at first (even though
i gave it user and password) no auth-string, probably to test which
auth-scheme is used.

the server sent a 401 with the WWW-Authenticate: Basic header, and NOW

wget tried to reuse the connection, which is already closed, and
should not have been reused, because there was no Content-length
header, there was no Keep-alive header AND it was http 1.0, but it
did, and the request failed. even though the server didn't do
anything wrong.

* What outcome did you expect instead?

i expected one connection per request which would have worked. i
didn't expect to read 'reusing existing connection' if there was
known to be no keep-alive
--8<--